Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike is both the dealer and the narc. Both the buzz and the buzzkill. Both the orgy and the post-orgy prayer circle.

The audience I saw it with—almost exclusively female—was whooping and hollering and ready for a party.

And for its first hour or so, Magic Mike provided it. At the Tampa all-male strip club where our titular (or should I say . . . naaa, it’s too easy) hero (Channing Tatum) works, they got to see all the pelvic thrusting and body-rolling their hearts could desire. The guys—a bevy of Hollywood hunks, including Alex Pettyfer (who looks like a stretched out Jude Law) as Mike’s protégée, Adam, a.k.a. “The Kid”; True Blood’s pectacular Joe Manganiello; and White Collar’s chiseled Matt Bomer (I said Bomer, people, Bomer)—run through a variety of choreographed moves, almost all of which end with them dry humping some half terrified/half euphoric woman from the crowd.

The dancing is fun and cheesy and hot—and in particular, Tatum reminds us that he’s a real dancer, not just an actor with some moves.

Matthew McConaughey is front and center as the club’s owner and emcee —and he’s giving us the Full...

Wes Anderson makes me nostalgic for things I’d forgotten, or possibly never even knew existed.

I never forlornly peered through a pair of binoculars at my window, as the 12-year-old heroine of Moonrise Kingdom does, but I related to her solitary vigil nonetheless. Trapped in a house with only younger brothers and lawyer parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) so emotionally remote they address each other as “counselor” and sleep in separate twin beds, young Suzy (Kara Hayward) is restless, dreamy, itching for a way out.

So when she meets fellow old soul Sam (Jared Gilman), a nature scout and orphan who wears a coonskin cap and smokes a pipe—he’s, not surprisingly, reviled by his fellow scouts—they instantly recognize each other as kindred spirits and conspire to run away together.

As the film starts, the scout master (an earnest Edward Norton, all sorts of adorable) notices that Sam is missing. He launches a search party aided by his troops—they’re all secretly thrilled to be putting their scout training to actual use. He also enlists the help of the town sheriff (Bruce Willis), who happens to be having an affair with Suzy’s mother.

As always,  Anderson crams his film...

If there’s one thing that the success of the French film The Intouchables proves—and it was something of a sensation in Europe last year—it’s that people like seeing love stories on screen, particularly those where two unlikely people come together and find that, against all odds, they complete each other. The fact that The Intouchables is a platonic love story, about two straight men, is irrelevant to this equation. Indeed, the film it often reminded me most of was—wait for it—Pretty Woman.

Strapping young Driss has arrived at an enormous mansion to apply for the job of caretaker to elegant Philippe, a paralyzed aristocrat. Only, he’s not there for the job, merely for the sign-off on his unemployment sheet, so he can collect his benefits.

But  Philippe sees something in Driss—that first spark of attraction, you might say—and coaxes him back, luring the nearly homeless young man with the prospect of an enormous bedroom, luxurious bath, and Philippe’s pretty assistant (Audrey Fleurot), whom Driss is sweet on.

Philippe likes Driss because of his youthful spirit, his complete lack of sensitivity to Philippe’s affliction (he makes jokes like “How do you know where...

It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment I fell out of love with Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows. Johnny Depp, of course, makes an excellent Barnabas Collins, the elegant, dandyish, fiercely house-proud 18th century vampire who, after being buried alive for 200 years, returns to his family home, circa 1972. And Burton luxuriates in the period details—the bean bag chairs, the lava lamps, the leisure suits, the inanely chirpy music of the day (“I’m on the Top of the World” et al). There is a fabulous bit where Barnabas lays his head down on a piano in despair, but rather than a gothic organ chord befitting a vampire of his status sounding. . . a tinny synthesizer beat plays instead.

It’s perfect.

But after a while, the film overstays its welcome. Burton, as is so often the case, has created this fabulous, almost fetishistically detailed world and doesn’t know what to do with it. He has a gift for visuals, mood, mimesis—but not necessarily character and story.

After a brief prologue where we learn of Barnabas’s fate—he had the misfortune of not returning the affections of a powerful witch (Eva Green), who killed his dearly beloved and turned him into a vampire—the film starts with that trusty...